Milgram's Experiment: Obedience, Authority, and Conscience

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There are many different experiments that have been carried out to test different psychological aspects of the human brain. One of the experiments I find most entertaining is the Milgram experiment. In the 1960s, Stanley Milgram's electric-shock studies showed that people will obey the most dangerous of orders. Stanley Milgram was a psychologist at Yale. He conducted an experiment where he focused on the relationship between obedience to authority and personal conscience. Milgram was interested in researching how certain people would respond to figures of authority when they were given instructions to do something that they did not feel comfortable doing, such as electrocuting someone for answering a question wrong. Participants for the study were found through a newspaper advertisement to take part in an experiment on learning and teaching methods. This is how the experiment went. One person was paired with another person. One was assigned a job as the learner and the other was assigned the job as the teacher. The experiment was rigged so that the learner was one of Milgram's people. Milgram's people were pretending to be real participants. The rigged learner was taken in a room where a device that could electrocute him was placed on his arms. The teacher went into another room that had the controls to the device. There were many different switches each marked with a higher voltage than the last. The learner then tried to learn word pairs read to him. The teacher asked the learner to recall the words. The teacher was told to shock the learner every time he …show more content…

These orders could be as harsh as shocking someone with 450 volts of electricity for not answering a question correctly. Stanley Milgram’s obedience study has been extremely influential in psychology. This experiment is just another experiment to show how amazing the human brain actually

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